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Real Estate

Lots of realtors are sitting around in their offices staring hard at their phones right now. It doesn’t matter how busy they were last year, the fear in January is always the same: I’m done for, the gig is up, and how the heck am I going to pay the mortgage. That’s the thinking.

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In recent weeks we helped a couple look at dozens of nearly new houses out behind Chapters, and as far out as Westbrook. It’s been a hectic season in that area. New home prices are on the rise and that’s put a lot of pressure on the resale market.

I’ve not seen a real estate market in Kingston like this one. Seven times in the last three weeks Cheri and I have found ourselves in multiple offer situations, where more than one offer was presented on the same day on a property.

And so another rock has been thrown though another window (actually the door, this time) of the lovely and important Elm Cafe at the corner of Charles St and Montreal St, north of McBurney Park and east of the fruit belt. What is that, three now?

I remember a few years back seeing a video of Will Smith trying a penalty kick on a soccer field. He’s a charming and coordinated guy, but that’s as awful a kick as I’ve ever seen. Here’s the video evidence.

I ran into a friend and sometime client on Princess St. “You look spectacularly un-real-estate-y,” she told me. She was beaming. I had just ducked out of the office to buy a sandwich. I hadn’t thought much about what I was wearing. I had no meetings that day.

I was driving and saw a man I’d nearly done business with, lumbering through the grey intersection with a fat wallet in his white mitt. Not an hour later, a little over $700 was removed from my bank account.

SOLD. Among the things that I’ve learned as a realtor is that sometimes an unimpressive house will sell in a day, Similarly, a marvelous property will occasionally linger on the market for no good reason.

We have lots of new listings coming in the next few weeks, Cheri and I do. There’s a new and very modern house 20 minutes north of the city with poured concrete floors and views out to pink granite hills so pretty...

I sat at the end of a road I don’t know very well, north of Bath, at least I imagine I was near the end (a long train was chugging past and obscuring all things west). An old man, handsome and keen, nodded, pushed a deposit cheque across his dining table like a promise ...

When someone asks me to price their house, first thing I do is wonder where I put my special pants, because I’m going to need those. And I dig out my custom-cut willow divining rods, the ones with the wee little bits of Thunder Bay amethyst set into the business end.

Here’s a quick way to keep up-to-date with our listings. All of them are briefly noted, and there’s a link to the Realtor.ca write-ups, more photos and so on. I’ll write more about all of them in time. But it’s busy out there and these deserve your attention.

We have a new City Council in Kingston. And it doesn’t seem to me that there is anyone around that glossy table eager to push ahead with the long-discussed Wellington Street Extension. We should be grateful...

I don’t really like admitting it but I had decent reason to walk through the new Dollar Tree store on Princess St last week. I was looking for a case for an old phone (how is it that we think of a two-year-old phone as “old”?)

I’ve been worried this year by all the vacant storefronts in the downtown core (haven’t we all?), so it’s nice to see some new businesses moving in. Sally’s Roti Shop will open soon on Wellington St, between Princess and Queen...

In a story in Saturday’s Whig-Standard (here it is), Mayor Mark Gerretsen offers some thoughts and opinions regarding the apparently imminent demolition of the very lovely Bailey Broom factory building. Well I have a few thoughts on his thoughts.

Every Saturday morning when I was a kid I’d ride my bike from Garsington, a village just outside Oxford, England, to my grandparents’ house on Boswell Rd., and then walk over to the Temple Cowley community swimming pool, where I’d do lengths for a while. It was one of my very favourite routines.

I haven't had other writers on this site before, but have thought a lot about doing it. And this morning Mike Chapman, one of the sellers at the gorgeous 733 Tacoma, sent me some thoughts on the house he and Lesley share with their kids. He says it better than I ever could, so this is his spot.

(Written in March.) I sat in my car outside a pretty downtown house that had just been listed for sale. The ploughs have pushed a lot of snow to the curb lately and I had to mount one of those abrupt slump-faced piles in order to leave room for traffic to get past. It felt a bit like I was in a very small jet...